Computers have become increasingly commonplace in our world and offer a variety of functionality. Some computers are designed primarily for individual use, while others are designed primarily to be accessed by multiple users and/or multiple computers concurrently. Varied functionality can be realized by a computer through the use of different hardware components as well as different software applications installed on the computer.
Although the variety of available computer functionality and software applications is a tremendous benefit to the end users of the computers, such a wide variety can be problematic for system administrators who are tasked with keeping computers running. This is especially the case with computing systems containing a large number of different components that must work together and function properly for the entire computing system to operate properly.
For this and other reasons, event processing has become a core capability for managed computing systems. In general, event processing entails deriving meaning from an inflow of events. Such meaning is often obscured, however, by the sheer volume of events associated with the various resources in a complex computing system. For example, factors including the number of users accessing the computing system, the number of applications running in the computing system, and the number of tasks or operations being performed by the computing system can result in a flood of diverse events associated with a wide range of available computing system resources.